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From Social Movements to Contentious Politics A FROM SOCIAL MOVEMENTS TO CONTENTIOUS POLITICS A COMPARATIVE CRITICAL LITERATURE REVIEW ACROSS THE U.S. AND CHINA Yunping Xie Submitted to the faculty of the University Graduate School in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Master of Arts in the Department of Sociology, Indiana University May 2013 Accepted by the Faculty of Indiana University, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. ____________________________________ Peter J. Seybold, Ph.D., Chair Master’s Thesis Committee ____________________________________ Najja N.Modibo, Ph.D. ____________________________________ Wan-Ning Bao, Ph.D. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First of all, I owe my deepest gratitude to my professor, advisor, and friend, Dr. Peter Seybold. I have been taking his classes for four semesters, which gave me much inspiration. Without his continuous support, enthusiasm, and mentorship during my studies at Indiana University Purdue University at Indianapolis, this work would not have been completed. I am also very grateful to my committee member, Dr. Najja Modibo for his help and suggestions. I have been working for him as a research assistant, and whenever there is a schedule conflict between his work and my thesis, he always gives a priority to my thesis and provides scope for my study. I also owe my gratitude to Dr. Wan-Ning Bao, she gave me a sense of home when I first came to IUPUI, helping me become accustomed to the life of America. I also learned a lot from her as a research assistant, which will benefit my future study. Many thanks go to Dr. Carrie Foote for her friendly helps and patience in dealing with my questions and problems during my time at IUPUI. I would also like to thank the students such as Brandon Mouser and Zhao Liu in the Department of Sociology for being welcoming, non-judgmental, patient, and making my studying and my life very enjoyable. iii ABSTRACT Yunping Xie FROM SOCIAL MOVEMENTS TO CONTENTIOUS POLITICS A COMPARATIVE CRITICAL LITERATURE REVIEW ACROSS THE U.S. AND CHINA This thesis is a critical literature review on the studies of social movements and contentious politics in the U.S. and China. Thanks to theories of contentious politics, we can analyze the studies of America’s social movements and China’s collective actions in the same “frame.” By making a comparison, this thesis tries to construct a theoretical dialogue between the studies across both countries. At the same time, it criticizes over- generalizing the mode “democratic-nondemocratic” in analysis of repertories of contentious politics and downplaying capitalism’s role in the social movements. From the various empirical studies in both countries, this thesis argues that a generalization should be based on the diversity of this realm, not just from the western perspective. Peter J. Seybold, Ph.D., Chair iv TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION ................................................................................. 1 Background ................................................................................................................... 1 Thesis Objective ............................................................................................................ 3 CHAPTER TWO: THEORETICAL OVERVIEW ............................................................ 5 Relative Deprivation Theory ......................................................................................... 5 Rational Choice Theory ................................................................................................ 6 Resource Mobilization Theory ..................................................................................... 7 Framing Theory ............................................................................................................ 8 Political Process Theory ............................................................................................... 9 CHAPTER THREE: PRELIMINARY ANALYSIS OF THE CONCEPTS AND LIMMITATIONS ............................................................................................................. 12 Social Movement and Contentious Politics ................................................................ 13 CHAPTER FOUR: REPERTOIRES AND MECHANISM ............................................. 16 Disruptive or Institutionalized: Two kinds of Repertoires ......................................... 16 Rightful Resistances and Struggle by Law ................................................................. 21 The Diversity of Contentious Politics in China .......................................................... 27 Rational peasants and emotional peasants ....................................................... 27 Ethical contention and structural nets of power/interest .................................. 29 The concept of “Shi”-----a new explanatory framework .................................. 31 A Concise Summary ................................................................................................... 32 CHAPTER FIVE: SOCIAL STRUCTURE AND CONTENTIOUS POLITICS ............ 35 Power Structure Analysis--An Integrated View ......................................................... 35 Legal System, the Indisputable Control Power ........................................................... 40 Media, Supporters or Restrainers ................................................................................ 44 Education, A Potential Factor ..................................................................................... 47 A Concise Summary ................................................................................................... 51 CHAPTER SIX: CONCLUSION ..................................................................................... 54 REFERENCES ................................................................................................................. 57 CURRICULUM VITAE v CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION Background In today’s world characterized with increasing inequalities, the slogan “we are the 99%” can best stand for our times. Social movements play an important role in America’s social change. Beginning on September 2011, Occupy Wall Street became a new social movement that fights against 1% of people’s greed and corruption. Nevertheless, as a newly social phenomenon, there are a few sociological studies about it except in news reports. “We tried to vote change, and that wasn't good enough. We've got to shout change"1 reported Andy Krow, this sentence stands for the simmering disappointment with the president. Although until now, we have not seen the clear outcomes of social changes, it should not be denied that this movement is rooted in the protesting history since 19 century’s Abolitionist movement. The difference is that the society has gone through great changes since 1970s, for example, a declining of middle class (Perrucci and Wysong 2003: 50). On the other side of the earth, China has witnessed with increasing the frequency the influence of protest movements. Parallel with the economic growth is the great inequality in China. Since 1990s, “the government deepened the reform to include urban areas, which altered the trend in urban economic development. In turn, it contributes to the divergence in the growth rate between the rural and urban areas in the following year, and therefore, causes an upward trend in the rural-urban inequality” (Ho and Li 2007). When it comes to social movements, there is no nationwide movement like what happened in the U.S. Due to varied folk customs and regional uniqueness, “social movements” in 1 http: //motherjones.com/politics/2011/10/occupy-wall-street-barack-obama 1 China seem more complicated, or maybe they cannot be defined as social movement in most cases. At most, they can be seen as the expression of interests. However, considering what China has gone through in the 30 years since the 1980s, we should not underestimate the importance of these collective resistances in China. As Perry and Selden state in their book Chinese Society, Change, Conflict and Resistance, “it is commonly asserted that despite far-reaching economic and social reform. China’s political system remains frozen,” (Perry and Selden 2003: 6), in other words, the Communist party-state remains basically intact in a market economy (Perry and Goldenman 2007: 3), and “ resistance movements are for the most part small, local and isolated from one another, lacking interconnective ideological and organizational bonds” (Perry and Selden 2003: 17). Further, Solinger points out that “ the central dilemma of the present reform is this; the paternalistic state apparatus derives its power and maintain its place as crucial legitimating symbol only to the extent that it continues to fulfill paternalistic functions” (Soligner 1993: 154). All in all, the context of collective resistance in China is very different from the western world. Nevertheless, thanks to contentious politics, we can analyze the studies of American’s and China’s social movements in the same “frame”. To better understand contentious politics, we can trace it to the article To Map Contentious Politics written by McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly who are not only the icons of political process theory of social movements but also the “founders” of the concept of contentious politics. In the article, the authors argue that “we concentrate on dominant-subordinate relations based on the hypothesis that contention involving substantial inequality among protagonists and has 2 distinctive general
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